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Performer of the Week

Thorsten Kaye (Zach, ALL
MY CHILDREN)

Soap Opera Digest

Published May 27, 2008

For
months, fans have been anticipating the inevitable -- Zach's discovery
of his wife's de facto infidelity with Aidan -- with a mixture of dread
and curiosity. The outing of this explosive secret would
surely detonate
Zach and Kendall as we knew them. The question was, just how
deadly
would the blast be? The answer -- smartly written by the AMC
team
and executed with the utmost sensitivity by Zach's portrayer, Thorsten
Kaye -- was one that surely put "Zen" fans' minds at ease.

Zach was determined to move swiftly past this bump in his
marital road,
but that was easier said than done. Reeling internally
despite his
outward denials from Kendall's confirmation of a truth he'd suspected
but
didn't want to face, Zach feigned a happy mood and suffered through an
intimate dinner with the wife, Aidan and a blissfully ignorant
Greenlee.
Back at home, he soothed his hurt by focusing on Kendall's, all tender
words and even more tender touches. She pressed him to admit
to the
rage lurking beneath his placid surface, but he refused, driving her to
dump ice water on him to to provoke a human reaction.

The ploy worked, and Kaye dazzled as he peeled back the layers
of artificial
calm on which Zach had been relying to expose his heartache, his
devastation.
"You want to know how it feels to picture Aidan's grubby hands
caressing
your perfect skin?" he challenged, his eyes flickering with
sorrow.
"It feels," he continued, nearly choking on the words as they escaped
his
pursed lips, "like a knife in my throat. Over and over and
over again.
When I get that image in my mind, I can't get it out. And if
I'd
known that picture was going to be in my mind every second of every
day,
I would have chosen to stay in that hole in the ground for the rest of
my life."

There it was, the admission Kendall knew was true but didn't
want to
face. The house of cards had fallen, but with both players'
cards
on the table, the healing could begin. Kaye's astute choices,
carefully
balancing Zach's desire to protect his wife with a hurt-fueled urge to
hurt her back, gave fans just what they needed: an assurance
that
when it's darkest, dawn is drawing ever nearer.